I was born in the suburbs of Orange County, California less than a two hour drive away from the Mexican border. Despite being the offspring of two very traditional Korean parents, I would say I’m definitely more American. Not that I don’t like being Korean–– I’m as proud as they come. But America to me is a country defined by its collection of different identities and traditions. Which means while Korean a big one, it’s not the only culture I was influenced by. And in all honesty, before anything, I’m a Californian at heart. And anyone in Southern California can tell you, there’s nothing more SoCal than good Mexican food.

Where I come from, tacos aren’t just cuisine–– you could say that your favorite taco place defines you as much as your name. I grew up knowing that some of the best tacos you could ever eat would only set you back a dollar per corn tortilla goodness, and that if I were ever craving said goodness, I’d probably only be 10 minutes away maximum from a decent taqueria at any given time. There were taco trucks at every school sporting event, countless after school drives to local joints, and an innumerable amount to-go orders consumed in my dining room; but that only scratches the surface of my long affair with the taco kind. So when I moved to New York for college and everyone told me I’d be doomed in ever finding a taco worthy of my Cali-Mex standard, I wept.

My journey to college looked a lot different from what I always imagined it would be. Yes, I took the obligatory trips to Disney with my closest friends, and sure I went to the beach a couple times, but nothing I did was enough to fan away the dark cloud in my otherwise sunny California summer: I might not be going to college. It took me the entirety of the summer to convince my parents to let me move to New York to pursue a higher education. I was already committed to The New School, but in the then-hindsight of my ever doting mother, I was still too young to leave her side. As for my dad, he was waiting for my mom to reject me so he wouldn’t have to, and I don’t think he ever thought for a second that my going was a possibility. It was a standoff but I, knowing that I got my stubbornness from my parents, was starting to feel I wouldn’t be successful in this particular battle; I was getting destroyed both in the debate, and emotion.

The alternative to winning my case was my worst nightmare: a community college well within the parameters of a three mile radius I could draw from my high school, which would also encompass my K-8 school. I had once told my best friend (before I knew the parent-war would occur) that having to grow old in the confines of the school-radius-neighborhood would be a punishment worse than death. I wanted to leave. There was always too much of the world to see, and too little my imagination could do to daydream me away from my never-changing surroundings. I could have committed to the full-ride scholarship I had received for a state college in California, saved myself the trouble of a summer long argument, and stayed with all of my closest friends; it just wasn’t what I wanted for my future. New York was the escape I’d always clichely dreamed of, but never thought I’d have the chance to perform–– and it seemed like I never would. By the end of my summer break I was enrolled to community college and resigned a life of more sameness. But as if my life were a drama intended for public appeal, as opposed to a self-important narrative, my parents gave me the okay to book a flight ticket to New York and The New School. Three days before the start of freshman orientation week.

The one rule that my mom intended for me not to break when I ran off to the other side of the country for college, was the one about having a boyfriend. I ended up dating the first boy I talked to on orientation day, whom I met just a day after I arrived to New York City. Though the guilt of my mother’s words made it take a month to say yes from the first time he asked, there was something cathartic about being able to do something I wanted without permission; though it wasn’t out of spite, it felt good to be in control after the summer of fighting. Truth is I had never really thought breaking rules was an option, and college was my first time away from California without my lawmaker. With this new freedom I fell in love in and with my surroundings, and I knew soon it would be hard to convince me that I didn’t belong in New York.

Chris, my Korean-born, Beijing, Shanghai, Malaysia-raised boyfriend, had a life the opposite of mine. His was filled with travel not only to new home cities, but all over the globe: Malawi, Indonesia, Amsterdam, Boston, etc. He became my adventure buddy, and just as important to us as the landmarks, were the new restaurants we could explore. I soon found out that his upbringing meant he didn’t crave meals the same way that I did, he just liked eating. So on our first date we went to a Korean restaurant at my request, but after that it didn’t take long for me to start asking for Mexican food. When I did, he was as happy to experience a new culture as I was to be eating my home staple. So after taking the suggestions from those around me and the helpful Yelp app, we began a taco tour in search of the best Cali-Mex taco in New York.

The first place we went was a recommendation of a new-New School friend and fellow taco enthusiast. He was also from California, so I had high hopes. Tacombi, situated near the heart of Greenwich Village, was bubbling over with people when we arrived. It was nighttime and the ambience was festive, with mood lighting that revealed pops of strikingly colored letters and lively patterns on a bright white wall. The restaurant definitely wasn’t the hole-in-the-wall, you’re-here-for-the-food kind of vibe that I was expecting, but it was my first time at a Mexican food joint in New York and I didn’t mind the new experience. I was admittedly off-put by their 12 dollar guac and chips, but I was there for the tacos so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

When it comes to judging tacos, I would break it into three components: tortilla, meat, and toppings. I believe for a good street style taco the tortilla has to be corn. I want it to be slightly charred with a nice soft-yet-brittle chew, which means being able to bite off a piece easily without ridding chewiness. And I want to be able to smell it. A good tortilla smells like what a wake-up yawn feels like, comfortable and familiar– drool optional. As for my meat, I usually go for carne asada, beef arguably the most basic and standard of the grilled taco meats. However I don’t like my steak neat and cubed, the beef should be unevenly chopped about same size as the nostrils that they’re heading towards. They should also be cooked long enough to get dark brown and taste savory erring on salty to counter the onions they should be served with. For toppings, I think that all you need is lime, white onions, and cilantro. Anything else, like decent salsas, is optional but those three are essential. I don’t need a fancy guacamole or crema to mask the delicate flavors of the tortilla or drown out the texture of the meat. If I’m being extra picky I also want to be served on a double-layered paper plate, but out of all of these this is the most trivial.

At Tacombi I ordered two carne asada tacos, and when they came out I was intrigued by how small they looked. However they appeared delicious and I definitely don’t mind a smaller portion if I’ll be compensated in taste. My first bite was good but ultimately underwhelming. Their tortillas were above par, but not prepared the way I liked. The steak meat was tender and sweet in a way I wasn’t used to, but overall too lightly seasoned for me to judge regardless. On top was their salsa tangy and tart but not the most complimentary, and there was hardly any onion and cilantro anywhere. The verdict stood for both tacos. Chris, who had never had a taco outside of Taco Bell before said it was definitely okay, but it wasn’t what he was expecting after all my excitement. I told him not to worry, and then proceeded to say something that I would go on to repeat often in my first few months in New York: “Tacos are better in California.” It was at least true in this case. Tacombi was trying too hard to sell me an experience through their interior decorating, and not enough through their food. Because it was so unbelievably busy, it could very well have been an off day, but I haven’t been back since.

Otto’s Tacos in the East Village was next. Awkwardly wedged between the back of a stranger’s chair and a window bar, my second experience with the New York carne asada taco was slightly better that my last in terms of taste. Otto’s was closer to tasting like home but something about the meat wasn’t right for me. They were slightly fatter than I’d liked, and oddly soft, not to be confused with tender, as if they’d been soaking in water after coming of the grill–– which is impossible since I watched them being made. Like Tacombi the carne asada was too sweet and I was starting to get fed up with paying four dollars per taco for a taste that I wasn’t asking for. I said all this to Chris, who didn’t know what to base his taste critiques off of, but knew he didn’t like the customer service. Trying out places with such raving reviews on Yelp was telling me that truly, tacos are just better in California.

For my next taco stop, I received a recommendation from a professor. After the end of class waiting for an elevator, we began to talk about my jacket which read University of California Irvine (UCI). It was my mother’s alma mater as well as the college of most of my closest friends back home. The professor told me he had attended UC San Diego and we soon got talking about the differences between our current and past cities. At one point in our conversation, I asked him if he knew of any good taco places. When he said out of all his time in New York, Los Tacos No.1 was by far the best, I decided that I would keep my hopes in check but that I would also definitely visit that weekend. The next Saturday Chris and I made our way down to Chelsea Market for the first time and hit a line that we soon figured out was for our recommended taco spot.

The first thing I noticed while waiting was that Los Tacos No. 1 comes with all the frills: guacamole, cheese, pico de gallo, two different salsas, limes, cilantro, onions, etc. I started dismissing it right then. And when I saw that they had another four dollar taco, I inwardly groaned. But the line said that this was something hopefully worth paying for, so I gave them my debit card, which I’m still getting used to using, and ordered two carne asada tacos. Though I couldn’t admit it that first time, every single component that I had looked down on came together to make one of the best tacos I’d ever eaten. When I took my first bite I almost swore, and I’m not big on curse words. My mouth was so confused. My taco was overfilled. The meat was still too sweet. It didn’t taste like anything from California, the golden standard of my taco, and yet I was definitely enjoying it. It shouldn’t have to have so many ingredients, I thought to myself, but there was not a single thing that I would have taken out. The cold creaminess of the guac with the perfectly sized chunks of fresh pico de gallo, heartier, earthier bean-based salsas to cut the amount of acidity from the limes. Los tacos was a juice soaked finger, messy, falling ingredient, absolutely-full-mouth affair. Chris was eating like it was the end of the world, and after we were done, he went back to buy two more. I was dumbstruck. It was just so different and infallibly delicious. But when we were cleaning up I started explaining, that no matter how good Los Tacos just was, it’s still not as good as a California taco. Sure New York had made a valiant effort, but all tacos taste at least that good in California for a dollar, so there’s your difference, I concluded. You’ll see, I told Chris.

When I went home for winter break I took Chris with me. I was nervous, not only did I have to leave my dream city, I was bringing my should-not-exist boyfriend along with me. The whole car ride from the airport I began to talk my dad’s ear off about how amazing New York was and how much I already missed it, both because it was true, and to prove a point about how good it was that I left. As much as I had wanted to see my family, I hadn’t missed California, and I dreaded how long I was staying. After I got home and settled in, I left to get some tacos.

I went back to my local spot, and thankfully my order was just as good as I had remembered it. It had everything that I listed that I wanted in a taco. But I found myself surprised at myself for missing Los Tacos too. It was surreal how fast the feeling hit me. Eating a taco from home made me realize as much as I loved New York, my trying to reject how much I missed home had led me to make everything a competition neither city could win. I wanted to be forget what it was like to be in a familiar environment, but my high standards for my tacos were all about the feeling of familiar. I figured my taco tour wasn’t so much about finding a good taco, as it was about finding a piece of home in the big city without having to think about why. I could hide behind the word craving instead of homesick. It was hard to realize I wasn’t starting a new life in the city, but instead making myself a stranger to my time in both cities by refusing to let either satisfy me because of the other. After trying so hard to escape, I felt guilty to admit how much I sometimes missed the luxury of knowing every corner of a neighborhood, or how the tacos I ordered would taste.

My mom met Chris when she came home from work later that day. To my surprise, she liked him almost as much as I do, if not more if that’s possible. All the anxiety I’d had about not being able to find a happy medium between both cities started to relieve. One city didn’t have to cancel out the other, or hold all the things important to me. Going back to New York after the realization felt different from the last time. I wasn’t so rushed to be a new version of myself who couldn’t enjoy becoming familiar with things. A few weeks into coming back, Chris and I discovered a Taqueria near Otto’s that we hadn’t tried. Taqueria Diana is so far the most recent stop of our taco tour. It tastes good. The meat is still on the sweeter side but I’m growing to like it, and out of all the tacos I’ve tried here, it tastes the most like home. And I’m glad. Though Los Tacos is definitely worth the walk to Chelsea, it’s nice to know that I’m still ten minutes away from a (more than) decent Taqueria.

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Rachel Lee is a current student at The New School’s Eugene Lang College where she studies economics. As a Millennial born and raised in California, Rachel enjoys listening to political podcasts while taking long walks on the beach. Her work has previously been featured in HoneySuckle Magazine.

My grandparents, Fred and Josephine, were both one hundred percent Italian. Grandpa Fred said he was born in a house in lower Manhattan that was torn down long ago to make way for an exit ramp for the Holland Tunnel. I was an adult by the time I thought to ask him about it, in 1995, after a dry spell of decades where I didn’t talk to my grandparents at all.  

I also found out that Grandpa’s parents, like my Grandma Josephine’s, came to Manhattan from Italy in the late 1890s. Grandma grew up on 101st Street, the daughter of an upholsterer, met Fred while still a teenager, and married him in 1921. I never thought to ask about these particular details, but Ancestry.com can take you a long way.  

I did notice, while I was still little, that my grandparents and my dad spoke differently when they were together, especially if they were cursing, or talking about food. They talked “as they used to say, in the old country,” my dad said. They’d say mozzaRELLa, gabbagool (capicola), proJOOteh (prosciutto). They’d say parmiGHANNa about the real, imported parmesan Grandma used in the kitchen to build her dishes, and they used the same word, with the same inflection, for the Kraft 100 Percent Real Parmesan that sat in the middle of the table, just for shaking, though I knew even then they were totally different and one was much, much better than the other; even though both were pronounced plain-old American style parmesan on TV.

Today I watch cooking shows and the host might pronounce the s in parmesan like a z, maybe not, depending on whether he or she is or is not Italian, depending on how authentic they want to sound. But I highlight my now-dark hair, changed my Italian surname the first chance I got and have never been to the old country. I can’t use the long, low, drawn-out parmiGHANNa pronunciation that my grandparents used with my Dad back when I was a kid and they were talking about food. It makes me feel pretentious, like I’ll never really be a part of that conversation again.

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When I was a little kid in the 1970s, my grandparents had decided to spend their winters in a squat, white cinderblock house next to the C-13 Canal in Miami that smelled like baked ziti. All I knew of them I got from visiting every winter Sunday from the time I was about five until I was thirteen, piling into my mother’s Caddy with my brothers, my parents and my mother’s Shih Tzus for the drive forty-five minutes south from Fort Lauderdale.

We usually got there around eleven in the morning, and Grandma had already been in the kitchen for hours, her hair and clothes trailing the scent of thyme and tomatoes. Hugging her was like trying to get your arms around a big, savory roll.

My grandparents’ house was decorated with a couple pictures of Jesus but more of Grandpa Fred—glossy, signed, eight-by-ten head shots on the walls of him on posing with a lit cigar, the smoke circling up as though it was just waiting to settle on his snow-white hair. Grandpa had been a union man back in New York, but after retirement had become something of an ersatz entertainer in South Florida restaurants. He hadn’t necessarily set out to join every piano bar crooner in a couple of songs every time he went out to dinner, but once word got around that he was the brother of the late Johnny Addie, who used to announce the fights in Madison Square Garden, everybody wanted to be Grandpa’s friend. From that point on, he said, people never let him pay for his own dinner.

The largest photo hung next to the door that led to my grandmother’s closet, which was actually a small spare bedroom housing hundreds of handmade outfits, holdovers from her days as a professional seamstress. She added to that collection of flowing multicolor pantsuits in paisley and retro prints until she died, in her 80s.

Grandpa and Grandma also had something called a rain lamp, a three-foot faux-gold light fixture that hung from the ceiling. It looked like a birdcage with oil running down the sides a la rainfall. Inside the cage was foot-high Venus Di Milo bathing nude among plastic plants and flowers. My mother called it the “ridiculous monstrosity.” My brothers and I called it the “magic birdcage thing.” We were fascinated by it.

My grandparents, in turn, were fascinated with the fact that my brothers and I weren’t really Italian. Of their three sons, my father was the only one who didn’t marry an Italian woman and have dark-skinned, dark-haired, full-blooded Italian children. It came up just about every Sunday.  

“Look how blonde you are,” Grandma said one Sunday early on when Rob was still little, about seven or eight. Like Grandpa, she was in the habit of addressing Dad or my brothers and me and avoiding talking directly to my mother. She squinted through hooded eyes and held Rob at arm’s length to get a good look. “Not like your cousins. Or like your aunts and uncles.”

Rob took a minute to respond. “But your hair is white, Grandma.”

“Ah, that’s just because your Grandma is so old!”

And because she was never one for long conversations, she then laughed and floated back into the kitchen, leaving Grandpa to point at his own cresting wave of white hair, and then at my younger brother Christopher, whose hair was almost black, and last at Rob and me, sandy-haired as Stepford children. Then he shook his head and sat down heavily, worn out by the sheer incomprehension.

I was silent, at nine already disgusted by this line of questioning. We went through it every Sunday, how Rob and I didn’t look Italian, how only Chris had somehow come out dark-haired. At four, he had yet to develop the spot-on Robert DiNiro impersonation that would diffuse such situations in the future.

My name was a problem, too. The first two names, Kimberly Sue: to me that sounded Southern. Not vaguely Southern, like magnolia trees, but explicitly Southern, like fried chicken with honey on it. It sounded fake, and it didn’t fit with my last name: Addonizio. Both my classmates and certain teachers liked to pronounce it “Addosneezio.”

My dad didn’t use Addonizio for business; he went by Addie. So did Grandpa Fred, when he’d go out to dinner and sing at the piano bar: at that point he was Freddie Addie. Even the famous Johnny, the fight announcer, had used Addie. They did it to “make it easier for people, you know. For business,” Dad said. Today if you look up Johnny Addonizio on Google you’ll find nothing about my grandfather’s brother. But if you look up Johnny Addie, you’ll find tons of photos and a full accounting of the Wall Streeter-turned World-Champion boxing announcer who was beloved all over the Eastern seaboard.

Meanwhile, I was stuck with only being Italian when I was in my grandparents’ house, and even then not really. I felt like an interloper in some other, purer family, albeit one whose name I didn’t particularly like, because by this time my last name at school had very definitely become Addosneezio. Even when it wasn’t bastardized this way, my last name felt glued onto the back of my first two names like a decision somebody made when they were drunk.   

Back then, at Sunday dinners when my father’s family members told me I didn’t look Italian, I stared at the ground and waited for the conversation to move to something else, something that might entice my mother to come in from the patio, where she sat smoking, drinking, glowering out the screen window.

I knew Mom was glad I didn’t look Italian. She’d already told me that while she was pregnant with me, she’d prayed I wouldn’t inherit my grandmother’s big Italian nose. Ultimately I didn’t really mind that she wasn’t Italian and so neither was I. But it was hard not to feel like I disappointed the Italian side of the family for being less like them and more the child of the woman sitting out on the porch, who sat smoking alone and refused to interact with them. It was hard not to feel like a fake.  

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Just like with my grandparents, I was profoundly incurious about how my parents had met and started dating until I was an adult.

“It was a blind date,” Dad told me on the phone. “My friend wanted to go out for dinner with this girl, and he said ‘you should get someone, this girl has a friend.’ He said, ‘we’ll double date.’ Not because he wanted company, but because he didn’t have a car. I had a beautiful car.”

  Dad called the girl up, just to take care of the arrangements, but they agreed straight-away that they each hated the whole idea of a blind date. They decided to meet in person beforehand. He was seventeen; she was fifteen.

“I remember walking up to the house, looking through the front window, and seeing her sisters there on the couch,” he said, describing the fair-haired maidens who would later become my aunts Bobbi and Cindy.  

“I thought, uh oh, this might not go so well. They were so good-looking, and in those days I really didn’t feel good about my looks, you know.”

Dad thought maybe his nose was too big. He thought he looked too Italian.

He needn’t have worried. There’s one picture of him from that time that he gave my mom when they were dating. He’s great-looking, baby-faced, bright-eyed, with a sweet smile. You can tell he’s a friendly, funny person.

“So I ring the doorbell and your mother answers the door. And she’s absolutely gorgeous. In those days she looked just like Mary Tyler Moore on that show with Dick Van Dyke.”

Mom’s parents, Bob and Evelyn Briggs from Marion, Ohio, were a mix of French and German. But all Dad knew then was that she wasn’t Italian.  

“Once she got a good look at me, I told her, ‘it’s okay if you don’t want to go out, now that you’ve seen what I look like.’  She said ‘no, it’s fine.’”  

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I grew up thinking that to be a real, true Italian is to know and use real parmesan cheese. Grandma had the Kraft on the table, too, but I think she thought of it as a completely different animal, added last, in a quick flourish at the table, as one would extra salt. Like me with my blonde hair and olive skin, Grandma kept it out of the kitchen and never quite knew what to make of it. I liked it, and I used it on my food, on top of her good cheese. For me the real stuff was something to hold onto, to help me explain to myself how my father’s side of the family was so different from my mother’s, how my family’s cooking had a warmer, rounder flavor than dinners I had at friends’ houses.

The cheese itself has many forms, some of which have been around since the Middle Ages. The recipe for the good stuff is more than 800 years old. To make real parmesan cheese, you must find yourself in a barn in the Parma-Reggiano region in Italy, with a bunch of dairy cows, very early in the morning. You milk the cows in the soft sunlight at precisely the perfect hour or not at all, and then you invite the milk to skim itself naturally by resting until it decides, due to the passage of time, to part with its cream.

Then you add salt — not too much; real parmesan has only about 35 milligrams in any two tablespoons, far less than most other hard cheeses. Coax the milk into a copper vat and mix in lactose-and-vitamin-rich whey and rennet. Rennet comes from the stomachs of young calves, somehow. It’s rich in enzymes and it helps the milk to curdle into cheese in just the right authentic Italian fashion. Leave the mixture to sit for ten minutes, then break up the curds into rice-like bits and pack those into wooden forms, which must sit undisturbed for the next two days, while excess liquid drains away.

Real Parmigiano-Reggiano is made only in certain government-designated provinces of Italy that happen to lie between the Po and Reno rivers. Each wheel is carefully logged, dated, authenticated and stamped with its own individual serial number before being shipped — in locked trucks to prevent pillaging, as real parmesan cheese is the number one most stolen food in the world.  

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I remember one particular Sunday with Grandma and Grandpa, one of the last, because I was getting older, almost thirteen, so Rob was twelve and Chris was seven. Once I got to be fourteen, we stopped going to my grandparents’ house at all.

We got there around eleven in the morning. Grandma made my parents peppers and eggs while they read her Sunday Miami Herald. My brothers and I had stuffed ourselves with cereal before we left our house, and something about the shiny consistency of cooked pepper skin made our stomachs curl. So we avoided the kitchen, wandering around the house and grounds like little zombies, sticking our fingers in the oil of the magic birdcage thing, meandering outside to find pebbles to throw in the silty water of the canal down the street. When we wandered away, Grandpa Fred, always dapper in Sans-A-Belt shorts in pastel colors under a matching guyabera, followed us through the house, making sure my mother’s dogs didn’t “get into any mischief.” On this particular Sunday, I think he was wearing a yellow combination.

After about an hour of sitting around on the patio they moved us all to the dining table, which sat in the front room by the big windows. You could sit there all day and watch people walk back and forth to the canal. So that’s what they did. They sat there, all day. Everybody except my mother, who preferred to smoke on the porch until the food was being served.

Grandpa followed us all to the table at first, then waited until we sat down. Then he stood at the head of the table instead of sitting down, knowing he had everybody’s full attention now. He was telling a story of the night before, when he went to someplace on Collins Avenue where the song stylist at the piano bar at Piccolo Restaurant saw him come in and called him to start singing with her, and he didn’t even have time to eat.

Grandma sat by his side as he told his stories and my brothers and I gazed uncomfortably at the Christmas holly on the plastic tablecloth, waiting for the food. Grandma hardly ever spoke up unless asked a direct question. If you did ask her something, she’d shrug, demurring. But she would sing sometimes, in a diminutive falsetto, like a shy, rare, Italian bird. Her favorite one, that we thought she made up but was actually from a Pillsbury commercial, went like this:

Nothin says lovin’

Like somethin from the oven

And Grandma says it best

The food really started coming in early afternoon with pasta, usually spaghetti and giant meatballs. We ate the pasta like it was lunch, hot and hugely filling, spreading the woody scent of oregano through the living room and out through the patio screen windows. We sprinkled Kraft parmesan over everything. Grandma jumped up and ran back and forth to the kitchen to bring things like salt and pepper and wine to the table about six hundred times.

But when the pasta course was over, paper napkins crumbled up and surrendered, my mother back out on the patio smoking, the rest of the adults just kept sitting there. It got boring again, so we kids roamed around the house for the third or fourth time, playing with the dogs. That took all of about ten minutes, which felt longer because Grandpa Fred would follow us around the whole time, crying, “Wash ya hands, wash ya hands!”

“You know what he means when he says that, don’t you?” my mother spat, later that night on the way home. “He doesn’t really mean wash your hands. He means ‘don’t you kids touch anything!’”

I was silent in the back seat. I didn’t agree. By thirteen I knew everything adults said usually had a double meaning, but it seemed to me like he really did just want us to wash our hands a lot. He washed his hands plenty while we were there. He’d step into the tiny washroom in the hall and do it without closing the door every half hour or so, like he was trying to teach all of us by example.

Between courses, Rob and Chris and I hunted in my grandmother’s kitchen for cereal or Oreos, finding nothing sweet or lovingly prepackaged at all. We came upon some aged struffoli, little dough balls drizzled in honey and coated with those tiny multicolored sprinkles that make kids’ eyes bug out with happiness. We brought it out to the patio and finished it off, then waited around until the sun went down for dessert.  

When we came back to the table, the adults had only moved on to salad: iceberg lettuce and black olives with pepperoncini, all drizzled with red wine vinegar and olive oil from glass cruets in the center of the table. When I got older I’d read about Italian all-day meals in books and magazines and realize there was probably a certain order all of these dishes should go in, if one were doing things formally, which Grandma did not. I think she probably just put things on the table as she got them ready. I think if the sauce was starting to fill up her little kitchen with its spicy tomato smells and sticking to the bottom of the pot, she’d go ahead and boil pasta and serve that up before she had a chance to pull out the pickled vegetables and slice up the salami for the antipasto. Later in the day she’d serve fish and potatoes, eggplant parmigiana, giant slabs of garlic bread, a second pasta course always different from the first one. By the time the bread was served, the adults had been drunk for hours. My brothers and I kept waiting for dessert.

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“I’m on a diet,” Grandma called from the kitchen, when the time finally came.

She floated through the living room, the sleeves of her handmade tunic fluttering a little in the air conditioning, holding what looked like a lemon meringue pie in a glass plate. She set it down in front of us and passed out slices on pie plates.

It was beautiful. Translucent yellow filling, creamy white meringue in beautiful browned peaks, crumbly brown graham-cracker crust.

It tasted like soap and death. I watched my father take his first bite. He smiled and looked down at the table, shook his head.

“It’s….ah…it’s really tart, Mom,” he said.

“I didn’t use sugar,” she retorted, in her soft way. “I’m on a diet. I told you.”

Rob leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“So it’s pie,” he said. “But it’s not really pie.”

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Kraft Parmesan in the green canister is made nowhere near Italy. It may come from somewhere near Kraft headquarters in Northfield, Illinois. It calls out to the world that it’s REAL in a red banner across its chest: “100% Real Grated Parmesan – No Fillers.” But it’s not real. It’s real parmegiano-reggiano’s second-rate sister. I remember it sitting there on Grandma’s plastic holly tablecloth, the can’s very shininess a symbol of what my great-grandparents came from Naples to Ellis Island for. At the same time, I saw it as an Americanized bastardization of an authentic Italian ideal – a knockoff. Like me.   

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Sunday dinners at Grandma and Grandpa’s were over by 1980.  They always wanted us over there by late morning anyway, and Mom wasn’t a morning person.

Even back then we could tell that Mom’s drinking came down my mother’s family line from her father, who’d apparently gotten it from his father. Every time we went to my mother’s parents’ house for dinner, the adults gathered around the dinner table for drinks and bridge, the evenings all devolving into my mother’s father getting loud and singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night” long after my brothers and I had fallen asleep on the couch.  

My brother Rob and I had started watching all four of our grandparents around the time I turned eleven and he turned ten. We didn’t discuss it at that point, but I know we were both wondering if any of them were ever going to say anything about Mom’s drinking. Not that they ever made it easy for us, because they were all never together at one time. Mom’s parents, Evelyn and Bob Briggs, who we called Mimi and Papa, lived only about twenty minutes north of Grandma and Grandpa in Miami, but all four of them seemed to ignore that fact.

Then when I was fourteen and Rob thirteen, Mom’s drinking became a major topic of conversation.  

There was the Sunday night Mom made lasagna, leaving it in the oven for more than an hour in a big Pyrex dish. Dad was helping, stirring sauce on the stove, both of them knocking back beers beginning in the afternoon, through the early evening, and long past the point when dinner should have been on the table. Then it was nine and Mom didn’t seem to think the food was ready yet, but Dad, a lightweight, laid down on the couch and fell asleep.

Rob, Chris and I hung around the kitchen, stealing cereal and whatever else was lying around, waiting for dinner while Mom sat in the dining room, listening to records, drinking. The lasagna smelled like heaven, but she kept saying it wasn’t done. Dad got up to assess the situation, started taking the lasagna out of the oven. Mom jumped up and stood between Dad and the oven, yelling that it wasn’t done yet.

My brothers and I left the kitchen at this point, well-practiced at avoiding situations like this one. Our house had two stories and we all had our own large bedrooms. We retreated to our bedrooms and closed our doors. I’m not sure what Rob and Chris did, but I stayed put in my room, listening to Dr. Demento on my yellow clock radio, looking for food in my backpack. That went on for about a half hour, and then we heard a crash downstairs. Mom had thrown the lasagna across the kitchen and destroyed the glass oven door. Her dogs were picking through the glass to get the food.

Later that week was the first of my pointed questioning of Dad. I wanted to know what he was going to do about the situation. To my mind, it was his job.

“I know, I know,” he said, looking around for his keys, about to leave for work, Mom passed out on the couch in the TV room.

“I talked to your grandmother about it,” he said, meaning my mother’s mother, Mimi. He must have figured that she’d surely developed some strategies over the years to deal with Bob, my grandfather, who had recently come to terms with his own alcoholism to the point where he avoided the “hard stuff” and now drank only beer and wine.

Dad said she had been no help.

“She said your mother’s not really an alcoholic, because alcoholics drink in the morning,” he said, nearing the front door. I looked pointedly at the couch, and then back at Dad, but the conversation was already over.

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When she was a little girl in the 1980s, Michelle Myrter often went to work with her father George at the cheese factory. He owned Castle Cheese of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. The company was headquartered in a grey suburban building decked out to look like a castle, with at least one actual turret. The building is made of concrete block and today its ruins crouch behind a 10-foot barbed-wire fence off the interstate outside of Pittsburgh, closed down by the authorities in 2014, grey stucco falling off the rounded, pretend-turret walls in chunks.

Myrter’s smile beams out from the pages of old issues of Cheese Market News that somebody has scanned and uploaded to the Internet. Castle Cheese specialized for years in making versions of parmesan and other cheeses with less water and lower lactose levels than that used in traditional cheese-making methods, which company officials said lengthened the cheese’s shelf life and made it easier to digest. Castle Cheese products were sold at Target and other stores until 2012. That’s when an employee whistleblower alleged that Castle Cheese included Swiss, Mozzarella and wood pulp in cheese it was selling to stores as “100% Parmesan.”

Agents sent George Myrter a strangely worded warning letter that the Grove City, Pennsylvania Allied News quoted as follows “…your product labels declare that the products are Parmesan cheese or Romano cheese, but they are in fact a mixture of trimmings of various cheeses and other ingredients.”

“In addition,” the letter continued, “your Parmesan cheese products do not contain any Parmesan cheese.”

Myrter’s case comes down to the standard of identity, the legal standard in the Code of Federal Regulations that stipulates what the U.S. government considers real and what it does not. But these regulations have been in place for decades, and Castle wasn’t the only one adulterating its cheese. Kraft, the maker of 100% Real Parmesan, added anti-caking agents and other decidedly non-cheese ingredients in the company’s products for years; it contains at least three percent cellulose – a thickening agent derived from wood pulp – in its parmesan; they’ve been sued over it.  But in 2016, the government charged Myrter, and only Myrter, with aiding and abetting the introduction of adulterated cheese into interstate commerce.

I was at a stoplight in my car near my house in Vermont in February 2016, when I heard an NPR report that she’d just plead guilty in federal court in Pittsburgh. I kept thinking about how much I’d liked Kraft Parmesan, had identified with it. Suddenly everybody was talking about how it was stuffed with wood pulp, and some other woman who had nothing to do with Kraft was headed to jail.

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There’s a picture of me from 1980, the year I’m fourteen. I’m wearing a yellow terrycloth jumper with spaghetti straps. I have impossible braces and lifeless brown hair, and my eyebrows are making headway toward their goal of colonizing the top half of my head. I’m on the couch at our house in South Florida with my knees drawn up at odd, jutting angles. I don’t know what to do with my long, gangly arms, so I wrap them around my knees, comporting myself as someone waiting for an explosion.

The photo was taken the day my father’s parents stopped by to say hello as they made their way to their summer home up north, far away from the Florida heat, in communion with my dad’s older brothers and their all-Italian wives and children. They didn’t call before they set out for our house. What actually was about to happen was much quieter than an explosion. It was more like a very small earthquake. My mother rejected my father’s entire side of the family so silently and thoroughly that none of us even saw or felt it at the time.

I read a lot in my teens, but didn’t really have any other hobbies. I’d asked for a sheepdog for my fourteenth birthday, but then took little interest in the dog once he came to be mine. So the Sunday my grandparents came by, like most of the Sundays after I got the dog, I had nothing to do but tug at the persistent knots in his smelly hair with a metal comb while he lay splayed on the floor in the TV room, hugging the air conditioning grate.

My dad came down the stairs and addressed my brothers and me as we sat in various poses of semi-leisure in front of the TV.

“Grandma and Grandpa are here,” he said.

We just looked up at him, then back at the TV or the dog or whatever we’d just been doing.

“Just don’t let them in the kitchen,” Rob said, lolling on the couch with the remote in his hand.

Chris and I just stared at him.

“The oven door? Duh?” Rob said, disgusted. “Do you want to tell them about the oven door?”

We heard a car door slam shut in the gravel driveway, and I got up and looked out the front window to see Grandma and Grandpa approach the house. He stepped out, tall and white-haired in a light blue suit, leaned over his cane and waited for my grandmother to get out of her side of the car. She’d need to get into the air conditioning quickly or she’d start to feel faint out there.

Now Grandpa Fred was knocking, Grandma just a few steps behind him. Dad and Rob and Chris and I were all there in the foyer, which was uncomfortable because it was very small. My mother had decorated it with a big chandelier and black and white wallpaper depicting huge Chinese letters. By now we were used to visitors asking us who in the house spoke Chinese. Nobody in the house spoke Chinese.

“How ya doin’ how ya doin,” my grandfather said as he dipped his head, narrowly missing the chandelier. He had one hand on the cane and the other waving out in front of him so we’d clear out of his way. We could hug him, but not until he was ready. Grandma was shorter, softer. She spread her arms out like big, warm wings of polyester, hugging my brothers and me all at the same time.

We ushered the grandparents onto the white couch in the huge formal living room we never used. It was next to the fireplace that, since we lived in South Florida, we also never used. The Shih Tzus barked at my grandparents’ feet.

My grandparents did not deal with the dogs. When Grandpa saw them, he said, “wash ya hands, wash ya hands.” They settled in on the couch and asked Rob and Chris and me about school. They seemed satisfied with our monosyllable answers. Dad had come back downstairs, perched on one edge of the couch and listened, nodding when appropriate.

“Is she here, or what?” Grandpa said after a while. Rob and Chris and I took it as a cue to wander off slowly in different directions.

My dad didn’t answer, so Grandpa asked us, “Kids, kids. Where’s your mother?”

His delivery always sounded like he was trying to quiet a crowd, but my brothers and I were usually just standing there, silent.

“I don’t know,” Rob said. “Upstairs getting ready, maybe?”

“It takes her a long time to get ready,” Dad said.

My brothers and I hadn’t realized she wasn’t planning on coming downstairs at all, I think, until just then.

“Huh,” Grandpa said. “She’s been up there awhile. She know we’re here?”

“I’ll go tell her,” Dad said, standing up and moving toward the stairs.

“She doesn’t know?” Grandma said.

My dad kept walking.

“I think maybe not. I think he maybe he needs to tell her,” Chris said.

We went on like that for an hour. She never came downstairs. I don’t think she ever really spoke to my grandmother again. My grandparents never saw the oven door, because they never got near the kitchen that day, because we never offered them any food.

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Kim MacQueen is the author of the novel Out, Out: Women and Apes and has published essays, most recently, in The Morning News, Wisdom Daily and the Stonecoast Review. She teaches magazine publishing at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, and has recently completed the MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Bay Path University. Come and visit on kimmacqueen.com.